Four years is a long time to wait. But that’s how long it took for a judgement to be handed down in Mazibuko & Others v City of Johannesburg & Others. It was four years ago that five residents of Phiri township, with the assistance of CAWP and CALS, began to prepare a legal case in the Johannesburg High Court challenging two critical aspects of the City of Johannesburg’s water policy – the involuntary installation of prepayment water meters and the one-size-fits all Free Basic Water (FBW) policy of 6 kilolitres per household per month. The case was, at the time, and still remains, the first South African case to explicitly test the constitutional right to water, as guaranteed in our Constitution, which establishes that everyone has the right of access to sufficient water.

And so it was, on 30 April 2008, against all odds and expectations, that Johannesburg High Court judge Moroa Tsoka handed down a historic and ground-breaking judgement which found in favour of the applicants on all counts. Judge Tsoka declared that the City of Johannesburg’s forcible installation of prepaid water meters in Phiri is both unlawful and unconstitutional and ordered the City to provide the applicants and all similarly situated residents of Phiri with 50 litres of FBW per person per day as well as the option of a conventional credit-metered water supply at the City’s cost. The judgment is remarkable for its sensitive understanding of both the law and the plight of poor people.

On the issue of FBW, the judge did not agree with the respondents’ contention that FBW was not an obligation stating that, “ … their obligation is to ensure that every person has both physical and economic access to water”. In this respect the judge pointed out that the national FBW policy was clearly meant to give legal effect to section 27(2)(b) of the Constitution. Further, the judge found the national FBW standard (6 kilolitres per household per month or 25 litres per person per day in a household of 8 people) to be a “floor” rather than a “ceiling” and that there was no evidence that the City of Johannesburg could not provide the applicants and similarly situated people in Phiri (i.e., large, poor households) with 50 litres of FBW per person per day.

On pre-paid water meters (PPMs), the judge found that the decision to install the meters amounts to administrative action and is therefore reviewable in terms of the criteria set out in the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA). He further found that the way that PPMs were introduced in Phiri was unlawful in that there was no adequate public consultation. Also, that there was no legal basis for their introduction as a service level, because the City’s by-laws only allow for the installation of PPMs as a punishment for violating the conditions of standpipe service. Moreover, as a credit-control mechanism, PPMs were only installed in Phiri and not allocated to the worst debtors, acknowledged to be government institutions and business. This, according to the judge, along with the fact that the residents of Phiri were not provided with all available water service options (specifically, the conventional credit-meters found throughout Johannesburg’s richer suburbs), amounted to unfair discrimination based on race, which is prohibited by section 9 of the Constitution. And finally, the judge found that the PPM automatic disconnection mechanism is unlawful and unconstitutional because it violates the right to just administrative action as set out in section 33 of the Constitution, section 4(3) of the Water Services Act and section 3(2) of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act)

The judgement ranks as one of post-apartheid South Africa’s most important legal victories for poor communities and all those who have been struggling against unilateral and profit-driven neo-liberal basic service policies. While it has specific legal application to Phiri and the City of Johannesburg’s water policies, it also establishes several principles that could be persuasive in other jurisdictions such as Cape Town.

The provision of FBW is a legal obligation, to give meaning to the right of access to sufficient water, which is more than mere physical access and includes economic access.

The national 6kl amount is a floor, and not a ceiling. Those municipalities with sufficient resources must move away from the floor as soon as they can to provide additional FBW especially to poor households.

The decision to install any kind of water device is reviewable as administrative action.

If there is no legal basis for the installation of the particular water device as a service level, it cannot be installed as such.

Where the water devices have been installed only in poor areas and/or without providing poor people with all available water services options, this is likely to amount to unfair discrimination on the grounds of race, which is prohibited by section 9 of the Constitution.

It is likely that any water device that violates the procedural requirements for adequate notice of the disconnection and reasonable opportunity to make representation is unlawful and unconstitutional.

The greatest credit for this extraordinary legal victory must go to the residents of Phiri who resisted the installation of PPMs, and to all the other residents of poor communities, both in Johannesburg and across the country, who have been fighting, and continue to fight, for accessible, affordable and sufficient water provision/delivery. While it is now clear that this judgement will be appealed all the way to the Constitutional Court, this does not detract from the political and social significance of this victory. It is a case which does not only have applicability across South Africa but which, by its very character, enjoins the attention and direct interest of billions of poor people around the world who are suffering under neo-liberally inspired water policies, alongside the governments that are implementing such policies and their corporate allies who seek to turn water into nothing less than another profit-making stock market option.

[i] Jackie Dugard is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) and part of the legal team for the applicants.

[ii] Dale T. McKinley is an activist with the Coalition Against Water Privatisation (CAWP) and independent writer, researcher & lecturer.

What are Durban's water/sanitation problems? Here are some articles for the local press by CCS community scholars and academics.

On 28 August, these and other grievances will be discussed at the Wolpe Lecture, with Coalition Against Water Privatisation organiser Patra Sindane, Wits University Centre for Applied Legal Studies lawyer Jackie Dugard, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum's Dale McKinley. Can their victory against Johannesburg Water (and the French company Suez) in the Johannesburg High Court on April 30 be repeated? The Phiri (Soweto) community won a doubling of Free Basic Water, a prohibition on substandard technologies (prepayment meters) only provided in black areas, and a chance to exercise their Constitutional right to water.

Join us to see whether these lessons of social and environmental justice can travel from Joburg to Durban.

Last July, we wrote an Eye on Civil Society article, Water policies hit the poor of Durban, that now deserves a partial retraction.

Only partial because on the one hand, Mercury journalist Tony Carnie's column last week warned of municipal crony capitalism: Many ratepayers have been pillaged by the new rate randage determination, while most businesses and industries quietly count their blessings.

On the other hand, there are two processes under way which show civil society can cajole the state into sensible water services delivery.

First is the historic April 30 judgment in the Johannesburg High Court outlawing pre-paid water meters and mandating 50 litres for everyone free each day, as a matter of constitutional rights.

Behind the case were five Soweto residents, the national Campaign Against Water Privatisation, the Wits University Centre for Applied Legal Studies and advocate Wim Trengove. They persuaded Judge Moroa Tsoka to finally give teeth to the Bill of Rights water clause.

An earlier judgment guaranteeing emergency services - the Grootboom case of September 2000 - was vague and hence useless for citizens' rights.

Second, local government is bending under citizen movements' pressure.In the Chatsworth neighbourhoods of Bayview, Crossmoor and Westcliff,for example, water is now flowing where once it was restricted.

The reason is a 10-year mobilisation by the Flatdwellers' Association, initially supported by the Durban Concerned Citizens' Forum organised by Prof Fatima Meer.

Bore fruitStrategies and tactics in the water wars ranged from street protests and widespread illegal reconnections to intense negotiations with state officials.

These engagements bore fruit last year, when deputy city manager Derek Naidoo agreed to a moratorium on evictions and services disconnections.

The city also began rehabilitating leaky plumbing and faulty electrical wiring throughout the flats. Additional refurbishment and upgrading of infrastructure in these three neighbourhoods is under way, budgeted for at least R38 million.

Chatsworth activists have won some battles but face others because after upgrading the city will install built-in restrictors on consumption. Likewise, Johannesburg Water had imposed pre-paid water meters on Soweto, and not on the northern suburbs.

Judge Tsoka declared this racist: I am unable to understand why this credit control measure is only suitable in the historically poor black areas and not the historically rich white areas. Bad payers cannot be described in terms of colour or geographical area.

In contrast, eThekwini city manager Michael Sutcliffe observes that Durban shunned this technique.

We do not agree that is the way to go, he told Business Day last week.

We replaced all our prepaid water meters when we created the new democratic government.

However, if citizens wish to file a similar lawsuit against eThekwini Water and Sanitation, they would easily find other low-quality water technologies only in poor and working-class areas, including urinary diversion toilets.

Consider, for instance, the thousands of 200-litre yard drums for which Durban water manager Neil Macleod wins international acclaim. The drums also fail the race/class fairness test. How many are there in upper-income suburbs?

Starting on July 1, if the council approves his proposal, Macleod may have an answer. Rather than replace the low-pressure drums with regular connections so as to meet Judge Tsoka's standards, instead the municipality will fill them up not only once each evening, but again with 100 litres extra during the day.

Still shortHowever, for homes with more than six people that is still short of the 50 litres per person recommended by international health experts, an amount promised back in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme.

One tempting short cut - albeit one which will do enormous damage - is to try limiting free basic water to people judged indigent, a classic technique of poverty targeting promoted by the World Bank.Given how volatile income can be in the informal sector, this is an administrative nightmare. How does a woman selling tomatoes prove her income? Means testing also stigmatises beneficiaries.

Instead, Macleod is considering using a house value of R190 000 as a cut-off to determine which indigents receive free water. But that too is a thorny approach especially in light of the municipality's rates valuation debacle and South Africa's real estate bubble.

Moreover, because the number of people living in each home is not recorded, the bias is towards small households. Yet larger households with tenants and Aids orphans most need the extra free water.

Macleod's plans should be scrapped in order to comply with the RDP, the constitution and the ANC December 2000 municipal election promise. All residents, said the ANC then, will receive a free basic amount of water, electricity and other municipal services so as to help the poor.

Those who use more than the basic amounts will pay for the extra they use. Serving all residents could be accomplished with an additional record for each household in the billing database, showing how many residents there are, by using ID numbers and other means of unique identification,updated once a year, so there is no cheating.

To defeat diarrhoea, cholera and other waterborne diseases, and to achieve fairness and gender equity (because women suffer most when water is short), we need a universal entitlement to water.

It should be paid for by cross-subsidisation: ie, an ever-higher price for luxury levels of consumption. Those using more than 30 kilolitres per household per month are, in our view, consuming hedonistically, and should pay handsomely for the privilege in an era of growing water scarcity.

Judge Tsoka's ruling should be heeded by Durban officials to avoid the embarrassment and expense of a court challenge, one aimed merely at getting ANC politicians to remember pledges.

At a time Sutcliffe and Macleod are criticised for inadequate sanitation coverage and broken pipes that spoil beautiful Blue Flag beaches, expanding free basic water would show compassion and common sense.

Patrick Bond is director at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. Chatsworth activist Orlean Naidoo is a community scholar at the centre.

Should poor people be given pit latrines and other devices to limit their consumption of water? A resounding yes was heard at the Africa Sanitation conference held during February at the Luthuli International Conference Centre in Durban.

Several hundred experts came for “toilet talk” this week. With one exception, our own attempts to enter the centre along with civil society colleagues were barred by the R2000 (A$333) entrance fee. Only a few passes went to community groups.

If allowed in, more civil society critics would raise the essential problem across the continent, including South Africa: under-funding.

Toilets and bulk wastewater pipes dug down out of sight and mind aren’t sexy for donors to show off to politicians and constituents.

Moreover, for the last quarter century, the pressures of World Bank structural adjustment programs broke African governments’ abilities to meet the citizenry’s needs, even basic water/sanitation infrastructure.

Today, most African states are run by venal elites who don’t care where their poorest residents defecate. Durban provides just a handful of public toilets to thousands of people in each of the city’s burgeoning shack settlements.

The new conventional wisdom is that self-help “total sanitation” (including hygiene education) should replace state responsibility. Without subsidies, if you can’t pay, then you can’t pee or poo in comfort.

Jon Lane of the Geneva-based Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council is blunt: “The need is to take sanitation technology from being subsidy-driven, which it so far is, and make it market-driven.”

In reality, the problem is not the subsidy per se, but its small amount.

Across the continent, typically, a tiny capital grant only allows poor people to build a rudimentary pit toilet, or at best one with some ventilation to trap flies.

Stay brokenOperating and maintenance subsidies are practically never supplied, even to empty the pits after they have filled up.

When water systems break down for the lack of borehole diesel or broken piping, they stay broken.

From the early 1990s, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, Mvula Trust and the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry began persuading poor people not to use water for flushing.

When persuasion doesn’t work, officials simply impose dry toilets such as ventilated improved pit-latrines (VIPs) on very impoverished people, who are invariably black.

Recall the Apartheid regime’s filthy “bucket system” for South Africa’s “temporary sojourners”: i.e. all black people living in cities. Water was a weapon in the white government’s arsenal of oppression and control.

But what goes around sometimes comes around. Mike Muller, a former department of water affairs and forestry director general, said that “the buckets, especially when not emptied by inefficient municipalities, provide community activists with an effective and ready-made weapon of protest, which has been used with substantial effect in protests about poor service delivery”.

Today, 14 years after Apartheid ended, hundreds of thousands of people still suffer buckets, in spite of President Thabo Mbeki’s promise that by 2007 we were supposed be rid of that 19th Century system.

Shockingly, there are still 9270 bucket latrines in wealthy Durban, along with 148,688 unventilated pit-latrines and 41,880 chemical toilets.

Lack of adequate sewage disposal, combined with heavy rains, high temperatures and accidental spilling of these buckets, create a perfect storm of diarrhoea, other gastro-intestinal disorders, and worm infestations — fatal threats to the many HIV-positive cases.

Worse, the alleged sanitation “improvements” since 1994 includes mass installations of VIPs.

InadequateAs former Johannesburg water regulator Kathy Eales said: “Many VIPs are now full and unusable. In many areas, VIPs are now called ‘full-ups’. Some pits were too small, or were fully sealed.”

According to Eales, “South Africa’s household sanitation policy is grossly inadequate. It speaks primarily to dry systems, and does not clarify roles and responsibilities around what to do when pits are full.”

Two innovations may make matters worse.

Sowetans are protesting against new “condominial shallow sewage” systems introduced by the French water privatiser Suez, which ran Johannesburg Water from 2001 until it was expelled five years later.

Victims of this experiment have no water cisterns above the loo, much thinner pipes, and lower gravity to get excrement out to the mains.

These clog up not by accident, but by design. Then, according to 12-step instructions provided by Suez, women are meant to stick their hands (with gloves, to be sure) into the pipes to remove it by hand.

In Durban, a post-apartheid bucket system — the urinary diversion (UD) toilet — was foisted on 60,000 households.

With their double-pits, separating urine and faeces so as to speed decomposition, the UDs are theoretically useful in water-scarce rural areas. But in Durban, with its humid weather and hence slow-drying excrement?

Earlier this month, Science magazine praised Durban head of water Neil Macleod’s efforts.

But the experience in the communities we know best — Umzinyathi and KwaNgcolosi in peri-urban Inanda — is unsatisfactory.

UDs have internal buckets that require emptying. No training was given on how to deal with faeces, except to dump it in the garden “for fertilising your veggies”.

Many are repelled by use of human excrement (compared to cow-dung) as fertiliser, because of the many diseases surrounding them.

The burden of cleaning is left to women.

Other creative opportunities for bio-gas are also foreclosed by UDs. Many UDs have become mere storerooms or are permanently locked because of the smell.

Councillors are useless when the UDs cease functioning. Nationally, our toilets are a scandal, for as Muller confessed last year: “The expansion of sanitation services to the unserved is slowing.”

He specifically cited Trevor Manuel’s 2006 Division of Revenue Act because of its “clear incentives for municipalities not to extend services to the unserved”.

To change this we need more state funding and genuinely pro-poor policies that get poor people appropriate supplies of waterborne sanitation, including micro biodigesters (sophisticated septic tanks) that convert excrement into gas for off-grid rural areas.

And in turn, we need much more political pressure. If we don’t get it, the government’s reversion to VIP latrines, chemical toilets, UDs and condominial sewers means that Apartheid’s sanitation indignities will be reconstituted.

[The authors are researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society.]

In the field of water, some say yes. National Geographic magazine awarded chief water official Neil MacLeod global recognition a few years ago, and the city won South African recognition as best metro in 2006.

In three ways, we disagree: • the municipality’s new system of ‘debt relief’ is hurting people living in Council Flats, as well as shackdwellers without proper supplies; • in rural parts of eThekwini, water and sanitation are substandard; and • for those hooked up to the eThekwini grid who pay their water bills regularly, poor people are suffering while the rich hardly notice price increases.

First, city officials Derek Naidoo and Michael Singh met Chatsworth council flatdwellers last month to explain the new ‘indigent package’: a conditional housing transfer, a minimalist 50kWh/household/month supply of Free Basic Electricity - but only for a few tens of thousands of households who consume less than 150kWh/month (not the hundreds of thousands who most need the promised free services) - and water debt relief.

Sadly, the majority of poor people living in shacks are getting services worse than urban residents did during apartheid.

Westcliff residents argue that a universal entitlement is preferable to an indigence policy, because the latter divides poor from working people: a violation of constitutional equity.

For poor people labeled indigent, the water service includes a new kind of flow restrictor that stops your water after a certain point.

But what if you are holding a funeral or wedding? You have to pay another R300 to have a different meter installed, which may take days.

As for arrears, they will be capitalised, repaid by siphoning off 20% of each bill. Yet the Free Basic Water is still just 6000 liters per household per month, which is not enough, as argued in an ongoing court case by activists in Soweto. (MacLeod filed testimony on behalf of Johannesburg Water in that case, which we think takes the debate backwards.)

Moreover, the fixed charge, water loss insurance and VAT together vastly exceed the amount we pay for water consumed. For those with no income who are unemployed, the arrears payments are unrealistic.

And the amount per kiloliter is up to R6.62, a vast increase over prior years.

Second, the problems are compounded in rural communities. Consider three areas around the Inanda Dam, which ironically supplies Durban with most of its water: Kwangcolosi, Mzinyathi and Maphephetheni.

After the trauma of displacement – still uncompensated - the water system provided after the construction of Inanda Dam was welcome, but the designs are inadequate.

Residents get either a 200 liter drum filled up by trickle each day – which is not enough for big families, and for when there are traditional events like weddings or funerals - or alternatively they go to poorly-maintained community standpipes that lack a good soakaway.

Mud is caused by livestock, which cannot get to the dam for water, and often women wait in long queues. There are still communities nearby with no water system.

For billing, confusion reigns because some are being charged and some are not.

As for sanitation, the Urinary Diversion system is the cause of dissatisfaction, because of filth, leading the majority of people to use their old pit toilets instead.

Ultimately, eThekwini policy should have service levels just as high for rural people, so that dignity, public health and gender equity are achieved: good, high-pressure taps inside the house, and flush toilets with septic tanks.

Third, upper-income eThekwini residents still have the best deal. The majority of Durban Water and Sanitation funding is raised through tariffs.

The 1997 consumption of water by the one third of the city’s residents who have the lowest income and pay their bills regularly was 22 kiloliters/household/month.

Shortly afterwards, MacLeod introduced ‘Free Basic Water’, but for just the first 6 kl/hh/month, and steep increases in price for the next blocks of water were imposed. By 2003, the (inflation-adjusted) price of the average kiloliter of water consumed by the lowest-income third of billed residents had doubled from R2 in 1997 to R4.

According to city official Reg Bailey, that price increase resulted in average consumption by low-income bill-paying consumers diminishing from 22 to 15 kl/household/month during the same period, an extremely large impact for what should be a basic need.

In contrast, for middle- and high-income consumers, the price rise was higher, but the corresponding decline in average consumption far less.

Indeed, the United Nations Development Programme’s 2006 Human Development Report indicates that

A new film, Xenophobia, will be screened from 5-5:20pm, produced by Rebone Ramphomane of the SA Liaison Office, a research, policy dialogue, and media production organisation active in the Zimbabwe Solidarity Forum. Ramphomane will lead a brief discussion.

Mary Chipende is a recent Durban immigrant with many arrests for Woza and the National Constitutional Assembly;

Joy Mabenge formerly directed the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (a Jubilee South affiliate) and is now an Idazim researcher;

Richard Smith is a lifelong social justice and anti-racism activist;

Judith Todd was banned by the Ian Smith egime for supporting democracy and then stripped of Zimbabwean citizenship by the Mugabe regime for supporting democracy, and she recently authored the book Through the Darkness (which will be launched at Ike's Books, 48a Florida Ave, Durban at 7:30pm).

Why are we calling this mass meeting in Durban?

The Zimbabwe crisis now requires urgent interventions by South Africans and others committed to social justice and democracy:

Those interventions have been requested by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (see below), in their recent call, alongside Cosatu, for a one-week border blockade as a popular sanctions strategy for social change - a call specifically made to distinguish people's solidarity from Washington/London-centred (or for that matter Beijing-centred) power politics.

Recall that the Durban membership of the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union led the way with their refusal to unload a Chinese ship with three million bullets destined for Zimbabwe army rifles (and the backs of the Zimbabwean povo) in February.

The Zimbabwe People's Charter (below), adopted in February 2008, insists that socio-economic justice is married to democracy. That way, recent promises of billions of US$ from imperial powers for an elite transition, will not distract the democratic forces from choosing people over profits, no matter that South African subimperialist and Zimbabwean neoliberal and crony-capitalist elements seek to dominate the negotiations process ahead.

With labour making a strong stand, how best can community and social movements contribute? We will discuss this, in the context of xenophobic attacks (especially now by Durban municipal officials and police) that still threaten Zimbabwean immigrants and many others. The growing organisation of community-refugee forces continues seeking ways to fight back, to generate a bottom-up foreign policy of civil society that transcends old colonial boundaries.

There is no entry charge. Food will be served free from 7-8pm, and transport will be provided free to community organisations (phone 031 260 3195).

The Zimbabwe Solidarity Forum is a network movement of progressive South African civil society organisations, including youth, women, labour, faith-based, human rights and student formations that are engaged in the promotion of solidarity for sustainable peace, democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe. (See http://groups.google.co.za/group/zimbabwe-solidarity-forum?hl=en)

CCS and the ZSF believe that shifts in power and the exposure of the militarised nature of the Zimbabwean state mean politics have fundamentally changed, requiring new strategies and new forms of organising ourselves.

Thousands have been chased and forced to run from their places of safety. Eye witnesses flee to avoid the action of those who wish to silence evidence of the daylight abductions now taking place in Zimbabwe. Families, grandparents, and entire villages are being punished for being linked to anybody known to oppose ZANU rule. Rural bases of soldiers, living off rural communities and humanitarian aid, and militia controlled road blocks demanding tolls and political compliance, confirm the final implementation of Zimbabwe’s total militarisation by a military junta: Shiri, Chiwenga, Chihuri and Zimondi.

The objectives of progressive forces are clear:

A multi-stakeholder transitional authority

An end to violence

The end of military rule!

Free and fair elections under a civilian authority

A people’s government that leads a social transformation process

Nonviolent, powerful efforts to expose the regime and force change are already underway. We need to build on these. We need strong structures that can involve people in decision making and engage government, whoever they are. New forms of organisation are required that are led by the voices of resistance from Zimbabwe, and that amplify these voices globally.

Declaration of preparatory meeting for trade union and civil society international solidarity conference with Zimbabwe and Swaziland.

Leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions and the Swaziland Federation of Labour met today, 15 July 2008, to prepare for an important international conference to be held in Johannesburg on10-11 August 2008, to mobilise solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and Swaziland in their struggle for democracy and human rights.

Both countries pose a massive challenge to the people of Africa. Recent developments threaten to roll back the spreading trend towards democracy in Africa. That is why this solidarity conference is so important. It is an opportunity for the workers of Africa to lead a campaign of the people of Africa to demand the establishment of democracy and respect for human rights in two countries where these concepts have been trampled upon in the past period.

2008 is a year of elections in both countries, but in neither case does the process resemble any accepted standards of democracy. Zimbabwe has witnessed an election stolen by a regime which was defeated on 29 March. Swaziland remains an absolute monarchy in the premier league of human rights offenders, in which opposition parties are banned and the proposed ‘election’ is a sham.

The meeting agreed on the need to build the capacity of the trade union movement into a neatly weaved programme of action. Whilst responding to the hostility of the political environment, it must also not neglect the primary responsibility to workers as the core constituency of the trade union movement.

The Southern African Trade Union Co-ordinating Council (SATUCC) and individual affiliates in the region need deeper engagement to institutionalise solidarity as a permanent feature of the regional trade union movement, in both Zimbabwe and Swaziland. In creating a network of trade unions throughout the region, organised and acting in solidarity with Zimbabwean and Swazi workers, it will constitute a broad solidarity front of the working class in the region

We need to identify companies, organisations and individuals or even families who might be associated with the ruling regimes, either politically, economically or otherwise as beneficiaries of the current system for further targeted action and isolation, starting with exposing them and their activities

We need to clarify our approach to the on-going negotiations in Zimbabwe, without forgetting to anticipate the emergence of such a possibility in Swaziland. In doing so, we must develop scenarios and use various models of transitions and government of national unity, as reference points. In this regard we must also clarify further, the role of civil society in political negotiations, to ensure that the majority of our people are not mere spectators in the processes that are unfolding, so that they become only preserves of elites.

On ZimbabweOn Zimbabwe the meeting expressed a preference for an interim government, where an independent person altogether, either a judge or a reverend, runs the state in the interim, with the different parties selecting ministries of their choice under his/her oversight, with parliament as an existing institution responsible for promulgating laws, until proper elections are held.

The reasoning is that the 29th March election outcome was legitimate, notwithstanding its own limitations, and can form a useful basis for such a possible configuration. This transitional government of national unity must not last for more than two years.

The meeting agreed to oppose Western powers-initiated sanctions other than sanctions targeted at the leadership of the illegal government. We however support actions initiated by workers of the region, continent and the world over, under the leadership of SATUCC, ITUC-AFRO and ITUC as a whole.

In this regard the meeting called on COSATU, SATUCC and the rest of the workers everywhere to refuse to handle goods destined for Zimbabwe and Swaziland for an initial period of one week, which will be extended if no progress is made in the realisation of our demands.

We agreed to work with the rest of civil society to stage a mass protest and rally when the SADC heads of states summit is convened in South Africa on 15-17 August 2008. The protest march and rally will be held on 16 August near the venue of the summit.

PRESS STATEMENT ISSUED BY CIVIL SOCIETY FOLLOWING THE NATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY CONSULTATIVE MEETINGHarare, 15 July 2008

We, civil society organizations acting on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe, today reassert our commitment to the struggle for a transition to democracy. In doing so, we stand firmly by the principles of democratic constitutionalism that are embodied in the People’s Charter and which represent the birthright of every Zimbabwean. Given the present environment of fear and oppression, we declare that democratic reform must be preceded by the cessation of violence, restoration of law and order, and facilitation of humanitarian relief. If such conditions are met, we are prepared to support the installation of a transitional government created after consultation with all stakeholders.

We believe that a transitional government would provide an appropriate vehicle for ushering democratic reform. The transitional authority would have a specific, limited mandate to oversee the drafting of a new, democratic and people-driven constitution and the installation of a legitimate government. We wholeheartedly reject the suggestion of a power-sharing agreement that fails to immediately address the inadequacy of the current constitutional regime. The transitional government must be established in line with the following:

1. Leadership by a neutral body. The transitional government should be headed by an individual who is not a member of ZANU-PF or MDC.

2. Broad representation. Individuals from a broad sector of Zimbabwean society should be incorporated into the transitional government. This should include representatives from labor organizations, women’s and children’s rights groups, churches, and various other interest groups.

3. Specific, limited mandate. The transitional government should be tasked with facilitating the drafting and adoption of a new constitution and then holding elections under the new constitutional framework. It should only govern the country until such time as the government elected under the new constitution is installed. The negotiating parties should provide a very clear timeframe for this process, with no more than 18 months of rule by the transitional government.

4. People-driven constitutional development. The process of drafting a new constitution must include broad-based consultation with the public. Interest groups such as women, labor, churches, and media should be given special opportunities to provide input. The draft constitution should not be enacted until it has been ratified by the public in a national referendum.

5. Restoration of good governance. State institutions such as the judiciary, police, security services, and state welfare agencies should be depoliticized and reformed. Steps should be taken to fight corruption and promote accountability for public officials. Restrictions on press freedom should be lifted and access to state media outlets should be opened.

6. Transitional justice initiatives. The transitional government should design and implement a system to bring to justice the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. This framework for transitional justice should be embedded in the new constitution. In the event of the above conditions not being met, civil society commits itself to continue in actions that increase pressure on whosoever will be holding state power to embrace people-centered democratic process.

THE ZIMBABWE PEOPLES’ CHARTER

Adopted at the Peoples’ Convention, Harare, on the 9th of February 2008

We, the People of Zimbabwe,

After deliberations amongst ourselves and with the full knowledge of the work done by civic society organizations and social movements;

With an understanding that our struggle for emancipation has been drawn-out and is in need of a people-driven solution;

Hereby declare for all to know that: -

1. Political Environment

In the knowledge that our political environment since colonialism and after our national independence in 1980 has remained characterised by:

a) A lack of respect for the rule of law;

b) Political violence, most notably that which occurred in the early to late 1980s in the provinces of Midlands and Matabeleland, and that which occurred in the years from 1997 to present day, where lives were lost as a result of government actions undertaken with impunity;

c) A lack of fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression and information, association and assembly, all characterised by the militarization of arms of the state and government.

The People shall have a political environment in which: -

· All people in Zimbabwe, including children, are guaranteed without discrimination the rights to freedom of expression and information, association and assembly, and all other fundamental rights and freedoms as provided under international law to which the state has bound itself voluntarily.

· All people in Zimbabwe live in a society characterised by tolerance of divergent views, cultures or religions, honesty, integrity and common concern for the welfare of all.

· All people in Zimbabwe are guaranteed safety and security, and a lawful environment free from human rights violations and impunity.

· All national institutions including the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, state security agencies, electoral, media and human rights commissions, are independent and impartial and serve all the people of Zimbabwe without fear or favour.

· There exists a free and vibrant media, which places emphasis on freedom of expression and information and a government, which guarantees independent public media as well as a vibrant and independent private media.

· All people in Zimbabwe live in a society, which is the embodiment of transparency, with an efficient public service and a belief in a legitimate, people-centred state.

And hereby further declare that never again shall we let lives be lost, maimed, tortured or traumatised by the dehumanising experiences of political intolerance, violence and lack of democratic government.

2. Elections

Fully believing that all elections in Zimbabwe remain illegitimate and without merit until undertaken under a new democratic and people-driven constitution, The People shall have all elections under a new people-driven constitutional dispensation characterised by: -

· A process of delimitation, which is free from political control, which is accurate, fair, transparent and undertaken with full public participation.

· A continually updated and accurate voters’ roll, which is open and accessible to all.

· Transparent and neutral location of polling stations, agreed to through a national consultative process devoid of undue ruling or opposition party and government influence, which are accessible to all including those with special needs.

· Voter education with the full participation of civic society that is both expansive and well-timed in order to allow citizens to exercise their democratic right to choose leaders of their choice to the full.

· International, Regional and Local Observers and Monitors being permitted access to everyone involved in the electoral process.

· An Electoral Court, which is independent and impartial, well-staffed and wellresourced to address all issues relating to electoral processes, conduct, conflicts and results in a timely manner.

3. Constitutional Reform

Holding in relation to constitutional reform that a new constitution of Zimbabwe must be produced by a people-driven, participatory process and must in it guarantee: -

a) That the Republic of Zimbabwe shall be a democracy, with separation of powers, a justiciable Bill of Rights that recognises civil, political, social, economic, cultural and environmental rights;

b) Devolution of government authority to provinces and to local government level;

c) A multi-party system of democratic government based on universal suffrage and regular free and fair elections and the right to recall public officials;

d) The right to citizenship for any person born in Zimbabwe. Birth certificates, national identity documents and passports shall be easily available for all citizens;

e) A credible and fair election management body and process;

f) An independent, impartial and competent judiciary;

g) The protection of labour rights and the right to informal trade;

h) The protection and promotion of the rights of people living with disabilities;

The People shall have a constitutional reform process, which is characterised by the following: -

· Comprehensive consultation with the people of Zimbabwe wherein they are guaranteed freedom of expression and information, association and assembly.

· The collection of the views of the people and their compilation into a draft constitution that shall be undertaken by an All-Stakeholders’ Commission composed of representatives of government, parliament, political parties, civil society, labour, business and the church with a gender and minority balance.

· A transparent process of the appointment of the All-Stakeholders’ Commission members as well as their terms of reference.

· The holding of a national referendum on any draft constitution.

4. National Economy and Social Welfare

Holding in relation to the national economy and social welfare that because the colonial and post colonial periods resulted in massive growth in social inequality and marginalisation of women, youths, peasants, informal traders, workers, the disabled, professionals and the ordinary people in general, we hereby make it known that our national economy belongs to the people of Zimbabwe and must serve as a mechanism through which everyone shall be equally guaranteed the rights to dignity, economic and social justice which shall be guided by the following principles:

· People-centered economic planning and budgets at national and local government levels that guarantee social and economic rights

· The obligation on the state, provincial and local authorities to initiate public programmes to build schools, hospitals, houses, dams and roads and create jobs.

· Equitable access to and distribution of national resources for the benefit of all people of Zimbabwe.

· A transparent process of ownership and equitable, open and fair redistribution of land from the few to the many.

· The right of the people of Zimbabwe to refuse repayment of any odious debt accrued by a dictatorial government.

· Protection of our environment from exploitation and misuse, whether by individuals or companies.

· Social and Economic justice as a fundamental principle that guides a new people driven constitution and in particular the specification of the people’s social-economic rights in the Bill of Rights.

And in particular, we hold that the national economy shall ensure:

· Free and quality public health care including free drugs, treatment, care and support for those living with HIV and AIDS.

· A living pension and social security allowances for all retirees, elderly, disabled, orphans, unemployed and ex-combatants and ex-detainees.

· Decent work, employment and the right to earn a living.

· Affordable, quality and decent public funded transport.

· Food security and the availability of basic commodities at affordable prices, where necessary, to ensure universal access.

· Free and quality public education from crèche to college and university levels.

· Decent and affordable public funded housing.

· Fair labour standards including:

o A tax-free minimum wage linked to inflation and the poverty datum line and pay equity for women, youth and casual workers.

o Safe working places and adequate state and employer funded compensation for injury or death from accidents at work.

o Protection from unfair dismissal.

o Measures to ensure gender equity in the workplace, including equal pay for work of equal worth, full and paid maternity and paternity leave.

· Access to trade within and without the national borders and removal of all obstacles on the right of small traders, small scale producers and vendors to trade and earn a living.

5. National Value System

Believing that we must commit ourselves to a national value system that recognises the humanity of every single individual in our society which we shall call ubuntu, hunhu,

The People shall commit to: -

· Provide solidarity wherever needed to those that are less privileged in our society as individuals or in any other capacity.

· Equally respect people of all ages.

· Challenging intolerance by learning and respecting all languages and cultures.

· An inclusive national process of truth, justice, reconciliation and healing.

· Recognising all people involved in the liberation struggle.

And that this be done with an emphasis that ubuntu/hunhu is passed on from one generation to the next at national and community level.

6. Gender

Holding in relation to gender that all human beings are created equal, must live and be respected equally with equitable access to all resources that our society offers regardless of their gender, and that gender equality is the responsibility of women and men equally, we recognise the role that our mothers and sisters played in the liberation of our country from colonialism and their subsequent leading role in all struggles for democracy and social justice.

The People state that these fundamental principles must be observed and upheld at all levels of the Peoples’ Charter, both on paper and in practice, where decisions are made about the following: -

· Our national budget and economy.

· Our legislative and government processes in order to allow representative quota systems.

· Provision by the state of all health care and all sanitary requirements of women.

· An understanding that women bear the brunt of any decline in social welfare security, economic and political systems.

7. Youth

Believing that at all given times the youth, both female and male, represent the present and the future of our country and that all those in positions of leadership nationally and locally must remain true to the fact that our country shall be passed on from one generation to the next,

The People state that, in order for each generation to bequeath to the next a country that remains the epitome of hope, democracy and sustainable livelihoods, the following principles for the youth must be adhered to and respected: -

· The youth shall be guaranteed the right to education at all levels until they acquire their first tertiary qualification.

· The youth shall be guaranteed an equal voice in decision-making processes that not only affect them but the country as a whole in all spheres of politics, the national economy and social welfare.

· The youth shall be guaranteed access to the right to health.

· The youth shall not be subject to political abuse through training regimes that connote political violence or any semblance of propaganda that will compromise their right to determine their future as both individuals and as a collective.

· The youth have the right to associate and assemble and express themselves freely of their own prerogative.

There is a joke I once heard, that if you are walking in a dark tunnel and somewhere in the distance you can make out light, then you must surely know that you are not in Zimbabwe. Some jokes have a paradoxical way of articulating our hopes in our disgust. Granted, the joke shows lack of agency, a resignation to powerful and unfathomable dark forces, and of the endless nightmare that is Zimbabwe. Yet Zimbabweans laugh at this joke, maybe derisively, but more with embarrassment, because they cannot but hope for a different outcome. That somewhere in the not too distant future, darkness will give way to light.

And an odyssey ‘through the darkness’ that is Zimbabwe was what we experienced at the Harold Wolpe lecture on the 24th of July 2008. The people to guide through this journey were a panel of four human rights activists, and a writer. There was Judith Todd; a daughter of a former Southern Rhodesian premier, a writer and long time political commentator, Joy Mabenge of Institute for Democracy in Zimbabwe, Richard Smith of the Zimbabwe Solidarity Forum (ZSF), Mary Banda from Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA).

It was a lecture with difference because it began 30 minutes earlier at 5 p.m. and with a short documentary on the recent xenophobic attacks in May. The documentary was told through the voices of Zimbabwean teachers, workers, peasants and political activists displaced by violence (economic and political) back home only to fall into the whirlpool of xenophobic hatred in South Africa.

It was relevant because as much as I care to admit, one cannot honestly deny that the Zimbabwe crisis has had little to do with the huge influx of people into South Africa and the resultant hatred of foreigners. I confess that if I did not have to do this review I would have certainly missed this part of the programme because it makes me uneasy. I am confronted with the true sense of my position as a foreigner – which is at once uncertain and dangerous but also full of the possibility to reinvent oneself outside constrains of family, tribe and nation.

There was always a certain level of indifference to reading books, apart from studying prescribed school texts, in my family. So the few books that were in my parents’ house were located in the bathroom. The ‘library’ consisted of two shelves in the bathroom cabinet among the shoes in the bottom shelf, the toiletries somewhere in the middle with dirty laundry mostly in the washing basket but also sometimes scattered all over. I was then never one to read books when not required of me and only prescribed ones if forced. But one night, unable to sleep, I decided to look for an easy read in our ‘library’. One book caught my eye because on its cover was a picture of a crowd of people demonstrating, but what intrigued me was that one of them held a placard that read “We want freedom, Independence Now”. I decided to read that book. It did not cure my insomnia, but opened my eyes to another narrative of my country’s history, Zimbabwe, which was different to the prescribed version. That was my first encounter with Judith Todd. The book was An Act of Treason: Rhodesia 1965.

The details of An Act of Treason need no recounting because there are deeply inscribed in Judith Todd’s talk, as the first speaker on the podium, on the current Zimbabwe crisis. To her the present crisis is a bad sequel of the Rhodesian crisis that began in 1965 with the declaration of UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence); the Liberation war in the 70’s and the farce attempts at finding a settlement in between; Lancaster House and independence in 1980; to Gukurahundi in the 80’s and the 1988 unity accord. Her point, the Ecclesiastic dictum - there is nothing new under the sun.

And to prove the dictum she began by mentioning that Thabo Mbeki’s eight year “quiet diplomacy’ is not new in Zimbabwe’s history. In fact, she said, the country was first a victim of quiet diplomacy in the 1969, a few years after UDI, when the British government sent Lord Goodman to negotiate with the Smith regime so that an amicable solution that would satisfy the political aspirations of a Black elite whilst real power remained in the hands of the white minority. Lord Goodman’s mission led to the creation of the Pearce Commission whose intention was to railroad the black majority into agreeing with a deal that fell short of real political power. The gamble failed, she said, because “ordinary black Zimbabweans seemed to materialise behind every tree”. Wherever the commission went throughout the country, people called for the inclusion of nationalist leaders in any negotiations.

Judith Todd drew parallels between the current ZANU PF/MDC talks and another negotiation in 1978 that led to the Internal Settlement between the Smith regime and African leaders led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. It was a settlement reached as the Liberation war intensified. It was another tactic drawn from the proverbial colonial ‘divide and rule’ tactic. Smith’s aim was to include moderate African leaders in a power sharing arrangement while excluding nationalists’ leaders (Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo) who called for real majority rule. And true to form a settlement was reached that was a parody of Majority rule. Abel Muzorewa became Prime Minister yet real power remained in white hands because they controlled the police, the army, judiciary and the civil service. It is a settlement that belongs in the dustbin of history because it produced a government that lasted six months and failed to end the liberation war. I am sure her intention was not to claim that those talks are equivalent with the current ZANU PF/MDC talks. We only fish it out, holding our noses of course, so that we can briefly analyse it, learn from it, then throw it back where it belongs.

The Lancaster House talks and the subsequent agreement were different. Lancaster was history par excellence because it opened up spaces that had hitherto been impossible to imagine in Zimbabwe’s political terrain. All we need to say here is that it ushered in modern-day Zimbabwe with boundless possibilities for the renewal of a nation that had been in crisis for the previous 15 years. However, what is important to Judith Todd was that while it guaranteed Majority Rule it failed to resolve the exercise of power. It left the culture of an unbridled authoritarian executive, a legacy of colonial occupation and white settler rule, which is at the heart of the Zimbabwe Crisis today. The lesson is that whilst it resulted in a black government it did not guarantee participatory democracy.

Because barely had the ink dried on the agreement, that the two former nationalist allied parties ZANU PF and PF ZAPU (the Patriotic Front), were already at each other’s throats. By 1982 Joshua Nkomo the leader of ZAPU and his colleagues were kicked out of government by Robert Mugabe. The PF ZAPU leaders were accused of treason (doesn’t that sound familiar), but worse of arming a guerrilla force in the Matebeleland and Midlands provinces. That was the harbinger of the Gukurahundi massacres, as thousands of civilians were killed on the pretext of suppressing the uprising. Again, as before, the state turned on its own people, albeit in independent majority ruled Zimbabwe.

The 1987 Unity Cord agreement between ZANU PF and PF ZAPU ended the hostilities. Again in true Zimbabwean form the exercise of power remained unresolved, on the contrary, the crisis of power deepened. The two parties agreed to share power in a unity government. The price PF ZAPU paid to be included in government was the creation of an executive president. Mugabe became president with vast powers that meant that he could effectively appoint a fifth of the members of parliament and even legislate laws by decree. Whilst it meant peace in Matebeleland it was another blow to a democratic Zimbabwe.

Fast forward to 2008…. as the current talks between the ZANU PF and the MDC on a power sharing agreement continue, we should not forget the lessons of history, Todd says. History that beget a Mugabe from Smith, should not also beget a Tsvangirayi much the same as the previous two, she warns. Rather Zimbabweans should transcend its colonial/post-colonial legacy, were big men with vast egos made history behind closed doors.

What is to be done (then)? The next two speakers’ task was to provide us with clues. For Joy Mabenge of Institute for Democracy in Zimbabwe, it is international solidarity. A solidarity that goes beyond governments, but is built through networks of progressive social movements. The case of the Chinese ship, An Yue Jiang, carrying arms destined for Zimbabwe was an excellent example, he pointed out. Dockworkers in Durban, Nambia and Angola through the International Transport Workers Federation, refused to offload the arms cargo in the various port throughout the Southern Africa. They refused on the basis that three million rounds of ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and 2,500 mortar rounds were for no other use in Zimbabwe (a country not at war) than on its own citizens. Furthermore, why would a government deem arms more important when there was a severe shortage of Anti-retrovirals in the country, Mabenge asked? It can arguably be asserted that if it were up solely up to the governments of Southern Africa the arms would have surely passed through to Zimbabwe.

He also drew parallels with the global anti-apartheid movements that forced their governments to boycott the apartheid state. From the 60’s to the 80’s governments in Europe and North America were forced by social movements outside state power to recognise the struggle for human rights for the majority of South Africans. He alluded to the fact that only in the last couple of years had civil society in Zimbabwe recognised the power of regional civil society to influence events in the country.

The next speaker, Richard Smith of the Zimbabwe Solidarity Forum (ZSF) based in Johannesburg, reiterated Joy Mabenge’s point that a peoples’ solidarity based approach for a democratic Zimbabwe is already happening. The ZSF is a network of South African social movements that help Zimbabwean immigrants deal with xenophobia, hunger and homelessness. The gist of his talk was to link the film mentioned above and the need to conscientise community based formations that migration to South Africa is inevitable because its not island apart from the rest of Africa. Therefore, a political crisis in Zimbabwe is their problem too.

It was only fitting that Mary Banda from Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), a Zimbabwean refugee, also came to podium. Banda survived beatings and torture from ZANU PF thugs in the run-up to the elections in Zimbabwe. She fled her home, leaving her family and friends to seek refuge in South Africa because of her political views. She drew the loudest applause from the audience for her short yet powerful tale of hunger and violence that is perpetrated on women by the state, which is supposed to protect the vulnerable. I suppose the audience connected with her because beyond the loft ideals of democracy and human rights, historical analysis and international solidarity, we are after all talking about real people who deserve to see the light.

How do we solve our common problems? Durban Communities & Social Movements, 12 June 2008

The Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal invites you to the following event:

Other information, contact Helen or Lungi at the Centre for Civil Society: 031 260 3195

(isiZulu and French translation provided

Wolpe and ActionAid International Joint Lecture: Gender, States & Markets

Eunice Sahle 26 April 2008

The last two decades have witnessed attempts to reform the economic and political characteristics of African states along the lines of the neoliberal development paradigm. In the economic arena, most states have instituted development policies aimed at significantly reducing the role ofthe state. On the political front, an attempt has been made to introduce good governance practices of which an important aspect has been the demise of one-party authoritarian states and the establishment ofmultiparty political structures. In neoliberal terms, these reforms are intended to rejuvenate Africa's stunted economic and political development and thus facilitate the continent's transition to modern market-based capitalist societies.

This paper examines neoliberal restructuring with specific reference to reforms geared to promote a market-based capital accumulation process in contemporary Africa. The paper contends that, contrary to the neoliberal theory that informs contemporary reconfiguration of the role of the state in the economic arena in Africa and elsewhere, state structures and markets are not gender neutral. The analysis demonstrates how the patriarchal ideology that has marked the evolution of a state-led capital accumulation process has contributed to the marginalization of the majority of African women. It also highlights how the promotion of market-led accumulation strategies by the transnational lending community and the governing institutions of this community, leading among them the World Bank, is deepening this process in the contemporary era. The paper has three sections. The first section discusses the dominant approaches to the central concerns ofthis paper and highlights the analytical power of a critical feminist political economy perspective. Section two demonstrates the gendered foundations of African states through an examination ofcore aspects of the state-led accumulation process in the colonial and pre-neoliberal restructuring periods. The last section analyzes the key features of neoliberal market-based reforms and shows their gendered nature.More

Truth, Propaganda, Power: An evening with John Pilger

THE HAROLD WOLPE LECTUREpresented by the Centre for Civil Society and the Centre for Creative Arts' TIME OF THE WRITER 2008

ACCLAIMED JOURNALIST JOHN PILGER AT TIME OF THE WRITERJohn Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. Therealities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and overagain, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration.Noam Chomsky

John Pilger, the world acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker,is one of the participants at this year’s Time of the Writer festival(25-30 March). Pilger, who will receive an honorary doctorate fromRhodes University, will be the featured writer in a special eveningprogramme on Sunday, 30 March, at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre(University of KwaZulu-Natal). Presented in conjunction with the Centrefor Civil Society’s Harold Wolpe Lecture, the evening, which will belive-streamed over the Internet, is entitled Truth, Propaganda andPower. Beginning with an extended trailer of Pilger’s new film The Waron Truth, and an introduction by veteran writer activist Dennis Brutus,Pilger will be in discussion with Mail & Guardian editor Ferial Haffajeeand UKZN academic and writer Patrick Bond, followed by a Q and A.

In the month leading up to the lecture the public will be given anopportunity of getting more acquainted with Pilger’s extensive workthrough the John Pilger Retrospective Documentary Film Festival,presented by the Centre for Civil Society who will facilitatepost-screening discussions. Entrance to the screenings is free.

JOHN PILGER BIOGRAPHY

John Pilger

John Pilger was trained as a newspaper journalist at AustralianConsolidated Press in Sydney. It was one of the strictest languagecourses I know, he says. Devised by a celebrated, highly literateeditor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. Itcertainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and freeof cliches, and to use adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I havelong since slipped Brian Penton's leash, but those early disciplineshelped shape my journalism and writing style.

Pilger became a reporter and feature writer on the Sydney SundayTelegraph. Within a couple of years, like many of his Australiangeneration, he and two colleagues left for Europe. They set up anill-fated freelance 'agency' in Italy (with the grand title of'Interep') and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelancedfor magazines, then joined Reuters, moving to the Daily Mirror,Britain's biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to aserious tabloid.

He became a feature writer, then special correspondent and chiefinternational correspondent. He reported from all over the world andcovered numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he becamethe youngest journalist to receive Britain's highest award forjournalism, that of Journalist of the Year. (He became the first to winit twice). Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals therein the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America's poor from Alabamato Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He wasin the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, wasassassinated in June 1968.

His work in South East Asia produced a memorable issue of the DailyMirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches fromCambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's reign. The combined impact of hisMirror reports and his subsequent documentary, 'Cambodia Year Zero', wasmore than $40 million raised for the people of that stricken country.Similarly, his report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover in1993, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then brutallyoccupied by Indonesia. His reputation as a 'campaigning' journalistgrew; his four-year campaign for a group of children damaged at birth bythe drug Thalidomide and left out of the settlement with the drugscompany, resulted in a special settlement.

In 1970, he began a parallel career in British television, starting withthe ITV current affairs series, 'World in Action'. His first film, 'TheQuiet Mutiny', is credited with disclosing to a worldwide audience theinternal disintegration of the US army in Vietnam. Thirty-six years andsome 60 documentaries later, he is still making challenging films forITV. His films have won Academy Awards in Britain and the United States.

He has been a freelance writer since he and the Mirror parted company in1986. His articles have appeared worldwide in newspapers such as theGuardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,The South China Morning Post, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), theSydney Morning Herald and The Age (Australia), Aftonbladet (Sweden),Morgenbladet (Norway) and Il Manifesto (Italy). He returned to write forthe Mirror for eighteen months during the build-up to the invasion ofIraq. Since 1991, he has written a fortnightly column for the NewStatesman. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigous Sophie Prize for '30years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.'

BooksThe Last Day (1975)Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981)The Outsiders (1984)Heroes (1986)A Secret Country (1989)Distant Voices (1992 and 1994)Hidden Agendas (1998)Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001)The New Rulers of the World (2002) VideoTell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004)Blowin' in the wind (2004)Freedom Next Time (2006)

Documentary FilmsThe Quiet Mutiny 1971Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia 1979Nicaragua. A Nations Right to SurviveJapan Behind the Mask 1987Cambodia The Betrayal 1990Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy 1994Vietnam: the Last Battle 1995Inside Burma: Land of Fear 1996Apartheid Did Not Die 1998Welcome To Australia 1999Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq 2000The New Rulers of the World 2001-2002Palestine Is Still the Issue 2002 VideoBreaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror 2003Stealing a Nation 2004The War on Democracy 2007PlayThe Last Day (1983)

HonoursD. Litt, Staffordshire UniversityD. Phil, Dublin City UniversityD. Arts, Oxford Brookes UniversityD. Laws, St.Andrew's UniversityD. Phil, Kingston UniversityD. Univ, The Open University1995 Edward Wilson Fellow, Deakin University, MelbourneFrank H.T. Rhodes Professor, Cornell University, USAAwards include1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year1967: Reporter of the Year1967: Journalist of the Year1970: International Reporter of the Year1974: News Reporter of the Year1977: Campaigning Journalist of the Year1979: Journalist of the Year1979-80: UN Media Peace Prize, Australia1980-81: UN Media Peace Prize, Gold Medal, Australia1979: TV Times Readers' Award1990: Reporters San Frontiers Award, France1990: The George Foster Peabody Award, USA1991: American Television Academy Award ('Emmy')1991: British Academy of Film and Television Arts - The Richard DimblebyAward1995: International de Television Geneve Award2001: The Monismanien Prize (Sweden)2003: The Sophie Prize for Human Rights (Norway)2003: EMMA Media Personality of the Year2004: Royal Television Society Best Documentary, 'Stealing a Nation'

Visit www.cca.ukzn.ac.za for biographies and photos of participants or contact the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts formore information on 031 260 2506 or e-mail cca@ukzn.ac.za

Organised by the Centre for Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal),the 11th Time of the Writer festival is funded principally by theDepartment of Arts and Culture, Humanist Institute for DevelopmentCooperation (HIVOS), Stichting Doen, French Institute of South Africa,the Royal Netherlands Embassy, and City of Durban.

'Reich is in the shadows, but still in control'John Pilger (Sunday Independent) July 30 2006

So says John Pilger, the award-winning journalist who was banned from South Africa for 30 years. In this exclusive extractfrom his new book, Freedom Next Time, he describes the 'epic dream and hidden reality' of today's South Africa

East of Cape Town, in a former bantustan known as Ciskei, is Dimbaza. From December 1967, more than 10 000 people were dumped here, mostly women and children packed into trucks like animals. They arrived at night and faced a windswept hillside without water, power, shelter. One of them was Stanley Mbalala, who was 12 years old.

He told me he remembered a forest becoming firewood during the first winter. People lived in tents and some built wooden huts with zinc roofs and dirt floors. Later arrivals had boxes made from asbestos and cement that were so hot in summer and cold and damp in winter that the very young and old perished in them.

In 1969, a spokesman for the chief of the Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Office explained the policy: We are housing redundant people [in Dimbaza]. These people could not render productive service in an urban area.

Physically, Dimbaza is remarkable. In the centre is a children's cemetery, as if an entire community has been arranged around the graves of its young, mostly of infants aged under two. There are no headstones. There are plastic toys among the weeds and the broken glass of shattered flower holders; emaciated cattle graze there.

I tripped over aluminium pipes embedded in pieces of broken concrete, which served as headstones. On one of them is scratched: Dear Jack, aged six months, missed so bad, died 12 August 1976. Most died from preventable illness such as diarrhoea, or they starved to death. At least 500 children are buried here, or were.

Stanley told me that in the 1970s, heavy rains washed away many of the graves, and little skeletons appeared at the bottom of the hill. There has never been the money to make anything of this sacred ground, he said.

In 1978 this rural concentration camp became, in the words of the regime, a showcase of investment opportunity (cheap labour); and factories were laid out like a grandstand surrounding the children's graveyard. Most closed down. Like so many other survivors, Stanley lost his job in 1996, two years after he gained the vote.

Such is the epic dream and hidden reality of the new South Africa. It means that PW Botha and other apartheid criminals responsible for the Dimbazas live out their lives in comfort while unemployment, undernourishment and malnutrition continue to assault the majority.

Almost half the population lives in poverty, with 22 million people described as desperate and 5,3 million South African children … suffering from hunger. According to the United Nations Development Programme, all the indicators of poverty and unemployment have shown significant increases since 1995.

It is often quite surreal. Driving away from the land of the very poor you arrive in the land of the very rich. In the Cape, as in KwaZulu-Natal, hunched, scabrous terrain gives way to a vast white-owned garden, as if you have been spirited to the lush green fields of southern England.

In September 2005, a comprehensive study was presented to the South African parliament that compared the treatment of landless black farmers under apartheid and today. During the final decade of apartheid, 737 000 people were evicted from white-owned farmland. In the first decade of democracy, 942 000 were evicted. Almost half of those forcibly removed were children and almost a third were women.

A law meant to protect these people and put an end to peonage, the Security of Tenure Act, was enacted by the Mandela government in 1997. That year, Nelson Mandela told me: We have done something revolutionary, for which we have received no credit at all. There is no country where labour tenants have been given the security we have given them. A farmer cannot just dismiss them.

The law proved a sham. Ninety-nine percent of evictions never reached the courts. Some white farmers continue to abuse their black workers with the impunity that apartheid gave them.

The ANC Freedom Charter states: Restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended and all the land divided among those who work.

When the ANC came to power in 1994, the priority of land restitution was allocated 0,3 percent of the national budget. In 2006, it is still less than 1 percent.

In Johannesburg, I shall always remember Houghton for its walls: long, high, white walls that bring to mind Breyten Breytenbach's remark about painting our windows white to keep the night in. The ubiquitous servants hurry to and fro; white people on the streets are rare.

It was an early spring evening in St David's Road, and the grass was glistening from the spray of many sprinklers as the first guests arrived. Chauffeur-driven Mercedes and BMWs with black faces in the back converged on a garden party.

They were mostly men in business suits, both white and black men who seemed to know each other and affected an uncertain bonhomie across the old racial divide. The party was given by an organisation which, according to its brochure, gives guidance on Black Economic Empowerment.

The guest of honour was Cyril Ramaphosa, the former secretary-general of the National Union of Mineworkers and the man who held the microphone for Mandela when he told the black nation on the day of his release: Your hopes and dreams are about to be realised. The principal negotiator of the ANC's historic compromises, Ramaphosa is now a multi-millionaire businessman.

When I arrived at Johannesburg airport, there was a large poster of him grinning and the words: Cyril invites you to share our interest in beer, food, property and newspapers. This was a share issue for a company called New Africa Investments, which, soon after Cyril issued his invitation, lost more than half its share value.

Cyril's message on the lawn in Houghton was that black people needed to empathise with their former opponents. Now empathising with rich white businessmen, for his metamorphosis he had received an accolade from Baroness Thatcher: she who once described Mandela and the ANC as terrorists.

Cyril is a champion, some would say the embodiment, of Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE, which he describes as a philosophy for the new South Africa. What this means is the inclusion of a small group of blacks in the country's white corporate masonry, which continues to dominate economic life. From banking to mining, manufacturing to media, white-owned companies, since democracy, have taken on black partners, the most prominent of whom are former liberation heroes, known as the struggle aristocracy.

Thus, the same black faces pop up in boardroom photographs. This co-option has allowed white and foreign capital to fulfil its legal obligations under new corporate charters and, more importantly, to gain access to the ANC establishment.

The rewards have been considerable. In November 2005, Nicky Oppenheimer, the chairman of De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer, announced the sale of 26 percent of the company to a black empowerment group, Ponahalo Investment Holdings.

The people who will benefit lavishly are half a dozen ANC luminaries, including Manne Dipico, the chairman of Ponahalo and a former premier of Northern Cape province, whose slice is R343 million.

The waBenzi are not a recent phenomenon. Long before democracy, magazines such as Ebony, Tribute and Enterprise celebrated the tastes and interests of a black bourgeoisie whose two-garage Soweto homes were included on tours for those foreigners the regime sought to impress.

Like the ANC government today, the apartheid regime in its last decade understood the value of a black middle class as a buffer in a brutally unequal system. Of course, there never was a middle - and that has not changed.

Faced with a growing popular resistance in the mid-1980s, PW Botha offered black businessmen generous loans from the Industrial Development Corporation. This allowed them to set up companies outside the bantustans. In this way, a black company like New Africa Investments Limited was able to buy part of Metropolitan Life from the Sanlam corporation. Within a decade, Ramaphosa was deputy chairman of what was effectively a creation of apartheid.

According to the ANC, the wealth generated by the newly empowered would trickle down and create jobs. The opposite has happened. As black capitalists proved they could be as ruthless as their former white masters in labour relations, cronyism and the pursuit of profit, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in mergers and restructuring. Between 1995 and 2000, as the black empowered moved into white enclaves of wealth and privilege, unemployment almost doubled and the majority of South Africans fell deeper into poverty.

While the gap between the wealthy whites and newly enriched blacks began to close, the gulf between the black middle class and the majority widened as never before. The new apartheid was one of class, not race.

In the 1970s, the ANC declared: It is a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact does not represent even a shadow of liberation. In 2001, George Soros told the Davos World Economic Forum: South Africa is in the hands of international capital.

In the South African winter of that year, Henrietta Mqokomiso stood outside her home in Alexandra township in Johannesburg. It was dawn and bitterly cold. She and her children knew what was coming.

Three yellow crosses were painted on her door, which meant that, in a few hours, her house would be demolished: a house that had precious electricity, water, a bathroom and a toilet. Along with thousands of others, she would be forcibly removed to a barren plot, where, if she was lucky, there would be a shack with no power, no water, no bathroom and no toilet. Apartheid was better than this, she said. Forced removals, the signature of apartheid, are common again in South Africa.

While the average white household income has risen 15 percent, according to government statistics, average black household income has fallen by 19 percent: a descent from one level of poverty to another. Power and water bills have risen so fast they now consume almost a third of the income of the poorest families.

Just call me a Thatcherite, said Thabo Mbeki at a press conference in June 1996, at which the two-year-old ANC government presented its economic strategy, known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution, or Gear. Behind a façade of wealth and job creation was, in all but name, a World Bank structural adjustment programme in thrall to an orthodoxy known as the Washington Consensus, which had devastated the economies of poor countries all over the world, notably in sub-Saharan Africa.

Public services would fall in behind privatisation, often in public-private partnerships; foreign investment would receive generous tax breaks; low tariffs would entice foreign imports; low inflation would preside over low wages and high unemployment (known as labour flexibility); controls on capital flight would be lifted and the rand would be subjected to the vagaries of the market.

It was as if the ANC aspired to be whiter than white in its relations with the rulers of the world.

We seek to establish, said Trevor Manuel, the minister of finance, an environment in which winners flourish. Having metamorphosed from long-haired biker and Cape Flats activist to the very model of a born-again capitalist, Manuel boasted of a deficit so low it had fallen almost to the level of European economies, with minimal public spending to match and a dedication to economic growth, the euphemism for a profit-inspired economy.

There was something very strange about all this. Was this a country of corporate hustlers celebrating their arcane deals in the voluminous business pages: of Harvard-trained technocrats breaking open the champagne at the latest credit rating from Duff & Phelps in New York? Or was it a country of deeply impoverished men, women and children without clean water and sanitation, whose infinite human resource was being repressed and wasted yet again? How did this happen?

I think the reason behind the ANC leadership going for the IMF approach is because they are ashamed that most of their people live in the Third World, said the Africa analyst Peter Robbins.

They don't like to think of themselves as being mostly an African-type economy. So economic apartheid has replaced legal apartheid with the same consequences for the same people, yet it is greeted as one of the greatest achievements in world history.

The question begs: what exactly was the deal struck between the ANC leadership and the fascist Broederbond that stood behind the apartheid regime? What had Mandela and Mbeki and the other exiles in Zambia offered? What role had the Americans and international capital played?

In 1985, apartheid suffered two disasters: the Johannesburg stock market crashed and the regime defaulted on its mounting international debt. The chieftains of South African capital took fright; and in September that year a group led by Gavin Relly, chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, met Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, and other resistance officials, in Zambia.

Their message was that a transition from apartheid to a black-governed liberal democracy was possible if order and stability were guaranteed. These were euphemisms for a capitalist state in which social justice would not be a priority, to say the least.

Declassified United States files make this clear. On October 24 1985, a top secret report of a White House meeting describes the urgent need to set up a US Corporate Council on South Africa that would co-ordinate business pressure on Pretoria to move more rapidly away from apartheid and towards an acceptable democracy. Full-page newspaper advertisements were agreed; in thinly veiled language, they would say that Washington had decreed that apartheid was now bad for business.

Soon after his release, Mandela was in the US. The ANC, he said in New York, will reintroduce the market to South Africa. With Mandela's reassurances, foreign capital, led by American companies, surged back into southern Africa, tripling its stake to $11,7 billion.

The unspoken deal was that whites would retain economic control in exchange for black majority rule: the crown of political power for the jewel of the South African economy, as Professor Ali Mazrui put it.

Over the course of three years, half a dozen critical decisions were made by a small group around Thabo Mbeki (who was advising Mandela), Manuel and Alec Erwin, the trade minister.

These were: in 1992, to drop nationalisation, which had been an ANC pledge reiterated by Mandela; in 1993, to endorse the apartheid regime's agreement to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which effectively surrendered economic independence and, in the same year, to repay the $25 billion of apartheid-era inherited foreign debt, grant the Reserve Bank formal independence and accept loans from the International Monetary Fund; and in 1995, to abolish exchange controls, which allowed wealthy whites to take their capital overseas. Economic apartheid was solidified.

When I met FW de Klerk in London in 1998, I said: You ensured the white population had to make no substantial changes; in fact, many are better off. Didn't you really win?

It was as if a secret truth had been put to him. Waving away the smoke of an ever-present cigarette, he said: It is true that our lives have not fundamentally changed. We can still go to the cricket at Newlands and watch the rugby. We are doing okay.

For the majority, the poverty has not changed, has it? I said.

Warming to this implied criticism of the ANC, he agreed that his most enduring achievement was to have handed on his regime's economic policies, including the same corporate brotherhood. He spoke about blacks who now live in big houses as the beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Isn't that the continuation of apartheid by other means?

At this, he beamed. You must understand, we've achieved a broad consensus on many things now.

The rural concentration camps at the likes of Dimbaza and Limehill, where tens of thousands of children perished, were the product of policies carefully constructed by Broederbond fanatics, yet today, as the journalist Terry Bell points out, the records of the Broederbond remain intact.

It is as though its motto, Our strength lies in secrecy, ensures that, unlike state records, the underlying history of apartheid and its respectable backers, is secure. There have been no public confessions; no requests for amnesty. It is as if the Reich merely stepped back into the shadows.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on its own was never meant to bring about reconciliation and justice. That unfinished business is the state's responsibility, which the ANC government has given every sign of abandoning in favour of its new business partners.

When I returned to South Africa after my banning, I discovered that much of the spirit of resistance had survived. Among people I met in the townships, it was expressed by those, dignified and resolute, forming a human wall around the house of a widow threatened with disconnection of her electricity, and in people's rejection of demeaning government RDP houses they called kennels.

Today, it is expressed in the pulsating mass demonstrations of the social movements and allied organisations that are among the most numerous, sophisticated and dynamic in the world. They express that amorphous power called public opinion.

The ANC, in its embrace of a rigid order, has underestimated and undervalued the imaginative genius in its own people. This is not to suggest that people fail to recognise the achievements of the ANC government: since 1994, as freedom of speech and association have flourished, calcified assumptions and attitudes have changed. All that is undeniable and admirable.

But the most basic freedom, to survive decently, has been withheld from the majority, who will not have forgotten Nelson Mandela's wise prediction: If the ANC does not deliver the goods, the people must do to it what they have done to the apartheid regime.

Freedom Next Time is published in South Africa by Bantam Press (Random House)

John Pilger, in his article, Reich is in the shadows, but still in control (The Sunday Independent, July 30), draws exaggerated and flawed conclusions which cannot go unchallenged.

South Africans opted for a negotiated settlement, rather than the vortex of civil war, and for redistribution through reconstruction and development, rather than through conquest.

Hence the great disillusioning of Pilger, for whom democracy was apparently expected to bring an end to capitalism, and who sees conspiracy and fascism behind anything suggestive of compromise or transition.

But the reality for ordinary people is that investment in housing, water, electrification, transport and communication, rising spending on social services and broadening participation in a growing economy, are steadily bringing dignity and opportunity, where there was formerly misery and vulnerability.

His claim that the ANC government has opted for minimal public spending cannot go unchallenged. Here are the facts Pilger chooses to ignore:

Non-interest government spending is a larger share of gross domestic product than it was in the early 1990s, while social services and housing have increased from 50 percent of the total to 60 percent

currently.

More than 700 new health clinics have been constructed, 215 mobile clinics established and charges for public health services have largely been removed for poor people.

The child-support grant programme has added abou

To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa

Speaker: Xolela MangcuTopic: To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa Date: 21 February Time: 5:30-7:00Venue: Howard College Auditorium (Howard College Campus)

Xolela Mangcu

Xolela Mangcu is well known for the incisive social commentary that characterises his regular newspaper columns. In To the Brink Mangcu turns his focus to the state of South Africa’s evolving democracy. From policy controversies surrounding HIV/AIDS, Zimbabwe, corruption and the constant labelling of black critics as ‘foot lickers’ of the white man, no relevant issues escape his analysis of the racial insider/outsider dynamic that has evolved under Thabo Mbeki’s rule.

Drawing on the intellectual history of the Eastern Cape as well as his own life experiences, Mangcu contrasts damaging racial exclusivity with the adaptation, renewal and tolerance that has characterised the best traditions of South Africa’s liberation movements. He discusses how black and white people could build a joint culture and, finally, examines the ANC’s election of Jacob Zuma and its implications for the future of democracy in South Africa.

XOLELA MANGCU is Executive Chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and a Visiting Scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand.